BCS has a strong lobby

Take out a quill -- the kind Thomas Jefferson used to pen the Declaration of Independence -- and declare this:

President-elect Barack Obama will solve the Middle East crisis before he solves the Bowl Championship Series.

He'll get the polar ice caps to stop melting before he gets "sensible" people to come to a college football consensus.

It was exciting, with all the woes in the world, that Obama would take time on "60 Minutes" to campaign for an eight-team playoff.

Any President who knows there is an SEC other than the Securities and Exchange Commission is all right in my book.

We can even see bashing the unpopular BCS to win electoral votes. Obama first made his playoff plea to ESPN's Chris Berman on the eve of the election.

The next day he scored a shocking upset in Indiana, which may end up with a 12-0 Ball State team getting shut out of the national title picture.

That's political genius.

Obama told "60 Minutes" last Sunday night he was going to "throw my weight around a little bit" in trying to force the playoff issue.

Bully for him.

Presidents have long interjected themselves into sporting matters.

Richard Nixon, a benchwarmer at Whittier College, invoked executive privilege in 1969 when, long before there was anything as odorous as the BCS, he declared the winner of the Texas-Arkansas "Game of the Century" would be that year's national champion.

Meanwhile, Penn State finished 11-0 and didn't even get a booby "Bebe" Rebozo prize.

Penn State Coach Joe Paterno remarked four years later: "I don't know how Richard Nixon could know so much about college football in 1969 and so little about Watergate in 1973."

Theodore Roosevelt, who walked softly but had more weight to throw around than Obama, was disturbed at the brutal violence that overtaken college football.

In 1905, 18 football deaths and 149 serious injuries prompted Roosevelt to convene representatives from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House. This would lead, in 1906, to the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., which would reform the sport and later reap billions from CBS for its NCAA basketball tournament.

Unlike Teddy R, though, Obama doesn't have a dog in the BCS hunt.

The troubling part about the "60 Minutes" interview was how much Obama knew about world matters and how little he knew about college politics.